Leslie Alexander and Phyllis Solomon (eds): The Research Process in the Human Services: Behind the Scenes

Abstract

The developing strength of our human service science base is perhaps one of our most important assets in behavioral health. Understanding and critically evaluating the strengths of scientific claims is therefore essential for any behavioral health professional. Many professional students are intimidated by statistics and methods courses and develop an aversion to the very science base upon which we’ve staked our future. Even students who are formally trained to be researchers often practice their craft as dogmatic truths rather than refutable hypotheses. If we are to fully use the science base, our students must be prepared to understand and discuss it and preferably to contribute to it. Part of the problem in our training relates to the presentation of the scientific process. It is often portrayed as dispassionate and formulaic. Published papers read as though the projects were conceived and executed in a completely linear fashion with nary a fork in the road. Statistical criteria for significance are the arbiters of important effects (and publishable results). Students are left with the impression that they must rigidly adhere to the practices that are modeled for them in the literature and described in class. As researchers, we quickly learn that the path is often murky, fraught with practical and bureaucratic problems, ambiguous in interpretation and just plain difficult to negotiate. It, however, is this human side of the enterprise that gives us our greatest sense of identification with the scientific method and community—at least as it relates to behavioral health and other human services research. Alexander and Solomon have done us a great service in the conceptualization and execution of their text The Research Process in the Human Services. In this edited volume they give us a glimpse behind the published paper by first featuring 20 human service research papers and then providing commentaries on the papers from one of their authors. In these postscripts, the authors’ expand on the rationale for the work, the processes that they endured to get it done (IRB’s, funding, negotiating bureaucratic problems in the university and the field, research assumptions that didn’t work in the field, etc.), problems in data analysis and interpretation as well as getting the work through peer review. Using multiple contributors, Alexander and Solomon show us the human side of the enterprise, demystify the process a bit and place the research within a context, not only substantively, but from the researcher’s personal perspective. The book is organized by the various methods that are employed in human services research beginning with the experimental/quasi-experimental methods and proceeding through observational studies, qualitative methods, the use of mixed methods and ending with a section on the secondary analysis of existing data sets. The papers were selected to represent a balanced cross section of interesting topics in human services that provide not only methodological variations but also substantive insights into many important topics in the human services. So, for example, topics include experimental interventions to improve vocational outcomes among methadone clients, meta analysis of the effectiveness of delinquency treatment programs for minority youth, in-home care for older adults, adverse D. L. Shern (&) National Mental Health Association, 2000 North Beauragard Street, Sixth Floor, Alexandria, VA 22311, USA e-mail: dshern@nmha.org Adm Policy Ment Health & Ment Health Serv Res (2007) 34:189–190 DOI 10.1007/s10488-006-0101-z